An offprint from

PLOUGHSHARES INTO SWORDS?

REFLECTIONS ON RELIGION AND VIOLENCE

ESSAYS FROM THE INSTITUTE FOR THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY

edited by

Robert W. Jenson

and

Eugene Korn

Copyrights to Plowshares into Swords? Reflections on Religion and Violence are held by The Center for Jewish-Christian

Understanding and Cooperation. No reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of

The Center for Jewish Christian Understanding and Cooperation at info@cjcuc.org

The Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation

Kindle Edition - 2014

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God’s Honor, Violence, and the State

Don Seeman

“Oh my soul, come not into their council, to their assembly let my honor not be united; for

in their anger they slew a man, and in their wanton will they lamed an ox.”

-Genesis 49:6

“‘My honor’: This is a poetic expression for the body and for the very person, as in ‘my

honor shall abide in the dust’ (Psalms 7:6).

-Samuel David Luzzatto (1800-1865)

Rabbi Yisroel Salanter (1810-1883), the founder of the pietistic Lithuanian Mussar movement, is said

to have quipped that if Christians knew how much the sound of church bells ringing brought pain to

the hearts of pious Jews, they would keep on ringing them all day long. I have no idea whether the

statement is correctly attributed, but it was repeated to me as a kind of wry joke by an American

rabbi in Jerusalem, and it helps to illustrate certain crucial themes in the phenomenology of religious

enmity.

For one thing, it highlights the fact that religious sights and sounds contribute not just to the

articulate symbolic systems with which they are often associated, but also help to shape a diffuse

religious habitus or “ethical sensorium,” in which distinctive modes of attention and human being-

in-the-world are given shape and substance.1 Church bells were used in Christian Europe to

announce the times for public prayer and signify to the transcendent presence of Christianity in

public space. But by that same token they also signified that this was Christian space, whose sound—

not only in war— might well convey hostility or at least disenfranchisement of non-Christians.

1 On the ethical sensorium, see Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

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For Jews in Christian lands, the peal of church bells must have conjured not just theological

discomfort but also their own impotence and relative invisibility; there are many ways in which Jews

tried to minimize religious friction with their neighbors by diminishing public displays of faith and

difference, like the way the Hanukah lights gradually moved from the courtyard in talmudic practice

to the inner sanctum of the home in Ashkenaz.2 Diaspora Jews had no equivalent to church bells or

to the call of the Islamic muezzin, both of which signified a claim of ownership over a whole social

order and state apparatus, and indeed, one of the formal restrictions of the dhimma code applied to

Jews in many Islamic lands was that they avoid loud prayer or shofar blowing and build their houses

of prayer to be inconspicuous. Tensions over the public sound of the muezzin in largely Christian or

post-Christian European cities today might provide a useful comparison.3

My point is that alongside purely theological disagreements that some observers focus upon, there is

also a more subtle language of control and humiliation at play in many real world meetings between

members of different religious communities, and this is one of the contexts we need to bear in mind

when we evaluate Salanter’s alleged quip.

Neither church bells nor calls to prayer are my concern in this chapter. But I do want to reflect, in a

phenomenological vein, upon those contexts in which social and theological conditions coincide in

ways that may encourage background enmity and structural oppositions between groups to emerge

into more acute and deadly violent expressions. In particular, I wish to focus upon the

2 “Danger” (from Gentiles) and inclement weather are the two reasons for this shift cited by Arukh Ha-shulhan to Orah Hayyim §671. 3 See for instance the blog essay by Austin Dacey, “The Church Bell, the Muezzin, and the Yodeler: Clashes in the Sacred Soundspace,” on his blog site “The Ethical Ear” December 17, 2010 (http://www.ethicalear.com)

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anthropological and theological contexts of honor and shame (or honor and humiliation), because

these are especially salient to Jewish thought and experience and help to encode a habitus that is at

once social-structural and affective-experiential in nature. I will argue that the honor/shame

dichotomy is an important bridge concept since it helps to structure discourse in the anthropological

and theological frames of experience simultaneously, once we realize just how closely linked human

and divine honor are frequently held to be.

In an earlier publication I examined a modern Jewish mystical tract that served as an apologia for

violence when this could be understood as vengeance (nekamah) for the humiliation of God and of

his people.4 This tract, which was written in response to Israeli public outrage over the murder of

Palestinian Muslim worshippers in Hebron by Barukh Goldstein in 1994, argues that spectacular

public violence not only repays the enemy for what they have done, but also restores collective and

divine honor (kevod shamayim). Against the cries from mainstream Jewish and Israeli institutions that

this act constituted precisely a dishonor or desecration of the divine name (hillul ha-shem), its author

argued in quasi-therapeutic terms that the massacre should more properly be understood as an

assertion of life and existence (yekum, tekumah) over against non-being, passivity, and death. Honor

and dishonor were invoked in ways that signaled an interest in far broader social and religious

concerns.

Inspired in part by my own need to work through a personal and scholarly response to the ways in

which divine honor was being invoked by some contemporary political and religious actors, I

authored a series of papers that dealt with this neglected theme in the writings of diverse luminaries

4 Don Seeman, “Violence, Ethics, and Divine Honor in Modern Jewish Thought,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73 (2005), 1-32.

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including Maimonides, Rabbi Kook, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Hasidic author R. Mordecai Yosef

Leiner of Izbica, as well as Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, the author of the mystical tract described

above.5 Each of these essays dealt with the problem of divine honor through the detailed analysis of

one or more authors, but this precision engendered a forest-and-trees effect that eclipsed my

growing sense of the importance of this theme to Jewish thought more broadly. My goal in this

chapter is therefore quite different. Here I want to offer an interdisciplinary and broad brushstroke

perspective on the fraught relationship between violence, state power, and divine honor in Jewish

life as well as thought. Some of this material—like my approach to Moses Mendelssohn and Jewish

modernity—is new, but other material has been reorganized to fit the needs of this chapter.

Honor and Shame

My argument in this chapter hinges on the fact that honor can serve as a bridge concept because it

has meaning in both the anthropological and theological registers. This should not be surprising.

Anthropologies and theologies clearly tend to shape and delimit one another through explicit

projects of imitatio dei as well as the more subtle borrowing of conceptual and experiential models

from one frame of reference to another. Biblical scholars have, for example, been well aware of the

ways in which kinship and gender norms in ancient Israelite society helped to shape the deep

narratives of biblical texts, including the kinds of imagery that could be used to describe God and to

5 Seeman, “Violence, Ethics, and Divine Honor”; “Honoring the Divine as Virtue and Practice in Maimonides,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 16 (2008), 195-252; “Martyrdom, Emotion, and the Work of Ritual in R. Mordecai Leiner of Izbica’s Mei Ha-Shiloah,” AJS Review 27 (2003), 253-280. For additional information on Ginsburg, see Shlomo Fischer, “State Crisis and the Potential for Uncontrollable Violence in Israel-Palestine,” and Eugene Korn, ‘“Without believing in God, I would never have had the power to do this’: Religious Violence, Sacred Texts and Theological Values,” both in this volume.

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shape the ethical perceptions of readers.6 Yet this generative insight has not been applied to the

consideration of honor as a bridge concept with strong contemporary implications for divine

ontology as well as human ethics. This is at least in part due to limitations in the traditional

representation of honor in the modern social sciences.

In my own field of anthropology, honor and shame have frequently been treated as purely symbolic

or even legal categories that constrain behavior in gender-specific ways in particular kinds of

societies—most notably those of the Middle East and Mediterranean.7 Despite local variations, the

“honor complex,” as it has sometimes been called, bespeaks a competitive, zero-sum competition

over prestige or standing (i.e. honor) among men that almost always involves control of women and

of land or other resources, and is nearly always backed by the real or implicit threat of violence.

Scholars have debated how rule-oriented this competition is or whether it is really governed by a

more flexible and contingent “logic of practice,” but the essential competition for power, reputation,

resources, and control have been crucial to most accounts.8 These approaches are not wrong in my

view, and I acknowledge that they shed considerable light on Mediterranean societies, but they are

also far too limiting.

6 For just one detailed example, see Don Seeman, “The Watcher at the Window: Cultural Poetics of a Biblical Motif,” Prooftexts 24 (2004), 1-50. A more controversial application of this principle to contemporary Jewish theology may be found in David R. Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God (Westminster John Knox Press, 1993) 7 See David Gilmore, Honor, Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean (Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association, 1987); John K. Campbell, Honor, Family and Patronage: A Study of Moral and Institutional Values in a Greek Mountain Community (Oxford: University Press, 1973). For more contemporary views, see Michael Herzfeld, The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village (Princeton: University Press, 1988); Frank Henderson Stewart, Honor (Chicago: University Press, 1994). 8 See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: University Press, 1977).

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The most important critique of anthropology’s honor trope was initiated by Michael Herzfeld, who

argued that local diversity belies assumptions about a coherent regional culture system.9 Herzfeld

also argued that the reification of honor in anthropological writing on the Mediterranean has had

political effects that must be confronted, including the attempt to cast the whole southern

Mediterranean region as backward and “oriental” by comparison with other European nations. The

culture of Greece and the southern Mediterranean occupies an ambivalent space in the imagination

of the modern West according to Herzfeld, serving both as the revered cradle of Western civilization

as well as a pitied cynosure of cultural backwardness and stagnation.

Herzfeld does not say so, but the very same dynamic can be demonstrated with respect to Hebraic

culture, which was simultaneously revered as the source of Christian revelation and disdained for its

primitive backwardness and rejection of Christianity.10 Nineteenth and twentieth century Bible

scholarship was often explicit in its critique of so-called Hebrew morality, including those aspects

that were thought to reflect an honor-based moral economy that was neither modern nor Christian.

The portrayal of honor concerns as backward and non-Western came to a head in sociologist Peter

Berger’s influential 1973 essay, “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor,” which posited a

strong cultural shift between the old culture of honor and the modern one of human dignity, which

was characterized by an egalitarian and non-competitive appreciation for the social worth of both

men and women and to members of every social class by virtue of their status as citizens or even

9 Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology Through the Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge: University Press, 1989). 10 This was not always true. One early anthropological text that avoided implicit supersessionism was Julian Alfred Pitt-Rivers, The Fate of Shechem or the Politics of Sex: Essays in the Anthropology of the Mediterranean (Cambridge: University Press, 1977).

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members of the species.11 Berger’s account is open to qualification on many grounds, and readers of

Hebrew may well wonder whether it is more than incidental that the English concepts of honor and

dignity are typically expressed by the very same Hebrew word, kavod, which is derived from a biblical

Hebrew root that signifies substance or weightiness. I do not question that a broad cultural shift on

these matters has been under way for some time, but I do question the alleged completeness of the

transformation as well as the supposed irrelevance of honor to many modern social contexts.

Indeed, I have argued that it is the very assertion that such things do not concern “our” societies

that makes us structurally incapable of grasping what is frequently at stake in these matters when

they do arise.

What is the effect, for example, of frequent assertions by policy makers, academic activists, and

politicians that the Israeli-Arab conflict turns primarily on questions of honor, or on the inability of

Israelis (with their ostensibly Western cultural mindset) to understand Palestinian (non-Western)

obsession with this theme? Defining this conflict as one driven by the logic of honor serves first of

all to distance it from the categories of rational self-interest that supposedly drive Western policies,

and allows for the proliferation of facile statements about irrational or cyclical violence for which

political actors can therefore evade responsibility. Throughout the Oslo period, peace accord

advocates like Foreign Minister (and then Prime Minister) Shimon Peres repeatedly framed the

dilemma as one of somehow bridging Israeli security interests—a rational good—with the

Palestinian symbolic or emotional need for restored honor.

11 Peter Berger. “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor,” in Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner (eds.), The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (New York: Random House, 1973). For more on the theme of the broad cultural shift, see James Bowman, Honor: A History (New York: Encounter Books, 2007).

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Various American diplomats and “peace” academics adopted this meme as well. Yet in addition to

downplaying Palestinian rationality and moral accountability during a period of unprecedented

violence against Israeli civilians, this mode of thinking also blinded policy makers to the explosive

and dangerous consequences of unaddressed concerns by significant Jewish groups (in Israel and in

the Diaspora) for ostensibly emotional and culturally driven issues like the disposition of holy places

and sacred space, the public legitimation of national aspirations, and the politics of honor.

Apologists for violence like Yitzhak Ginsburg, the author of the mystical tract I mentioned above,

inserted themselves into this vacuum by claiming public ownership of these themes: Ginsburg went

out of his way to mock Peres in his tract Barukh Ha-Gever for failing to defend Jewish (and therefore

divine) honor, with a certain ironic appreciation for the Palestinians “who still know how to value

such things.”12

This is not just an Israeli problem. Anthropologist Unni Wikan and others have demonstrated how

European governments and judicial systems tend to invoke the “honor code” of non-Western

immigrants in ways that rationalize and partly excuse violence against women by giving lighter

sentences to men convicted of “honor killings” than other killers receive.13 “Honor” and “culture”

(and sometimes “religion”) are invoked almost as synonymous by the liberal state, in ways that

privilege the putative rights of groups—including the right to exercise lethal violence against

members of their own communities. I believe that something of this logic plays out in the

international arena as well, when societies or nations are held to different standards of violence

based on their presumed need to defend their own honor and emotional equilibrium in the face of

perceived insult.

12 Seeman, “Violence, Ethics and Divine Honor.” 13 Unni Wikan, In Honor of Fadime: Murder and Shame (Chicago: University Press, 2008).

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Ethnographic research I conducted on violent conflict between Ethiopian immigrants and the State

of Israel during the 1990’s demonstrated another way in which this dynamic can develop.14

Ethiopian-Israelis who were angered by a secret policy to discard their donated blood because of

fears about rates of infectious disease among public health professionals staged a massive protest in

Jerusalem that turned violent, leading to injuries of about 61 people (two thirds of whom were

police). The investigative commission that later convened spent months hearing testimony in which

committee members repeatedly solicited and then referenced testimony about Ethiopian honor

(kavod) in ways that simultaneously excused individual immigrant violence while downplaying the

whole community’s concerns with injustice. Officials focused on the supposed irrationality of

Ethiopian grievances (spilled blood was described as an “honor” offense) rather than focusing on

the much more devastating recognition that immigrants had been treated for a decade or more

primarily as vectors of infectious disease rather than citizens requiring their own urgent public health

intervention. “Honor” was just too tempting an out for public officials and immigrant leaders who

both wanted a solution that would allow them to save face.

The problem with honor and shame as cultural paradigms is therefore ethical as well as analytical in

nature. The problem is not just that it stereotypes certain kinds of individuals or cultures in harmful

and non-empirical ways, but also that it unfairly opposes rationality itself to culture in order to

systematically misdirect our attention away from the complexity of human motivations that are

frequently both strategic and conditioned by culture, rational as well as emotionally charged. The myth

14 Don Seeman, “One People, One Blood: Public Health, Political Violence, and HIV in an Ethiopian-Israeli Setting.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 23: 159-195; also, with somewhat different emphases in Don Seeman, One People, One Blood: Ethiopian Israelis and the Return to Judaism (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2009), pp. 150-179.

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of abstract and context-free rationality creates, as its own Frankenstein’s monster, the myth of a

savage and passion-driven religious culture that is not only “above all reason and intellect” (a

common Hasidic phrase cited in Ginsburg’s violent mystical tract), but also opposed to all reason and

intellect and thus incompatible with universalizing ethics.

Rather than deny the importance of honor in contemporary society the way some liberal theorists do

or else reifying it as an unwavering “rule” of culture (like the rule that supposedly forces Ethiopians

to respond with violence to the “shedding” of their blood at donor stations), it makes more sense to

try to contextualize the ways in which honor and shame can be more or less important in particular

social and political settings. Sometimes this has something to do with specific triggers like the

rhetoric of spilled blood, but this is truest when there is a whole ethos of grievance or vulnerability

that can be called into play or triggered under specific conditions. It may well have been shame or

dishonor, in other words, that lit the proximate fuse of violence for Ethiopian-Israelis, but it was not

primarily the shame caused by an abstract violation of culture (disposition of donated blood), but

rather the shame of being exposed to public view as defiled outsiders whose very blood was

perceived to be rejected.

Anthropologist Michael Jackson is on the right track when he argues that honor is just one culturally

specific variation on a whole continuum of human experiential responses to the anxiety of

powerlessness or non-being. “The connotations of mana in Apolynesian,” he writes, “dewa in Sumba,

miran in Kuranko, and honor in circum-Mediterranean societies suggest that, despite cultural

variations similarly embodied sensations of amplitude… everywhere constitute our sense of

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existence and autonomy.”15 Jackson does not do enough to spell out just how honor and mana, for

instance, might be related, but he points us towards something inherent in the human condition,

differently “embodied sensations of amplitude” that take cultural form but are not simplistically

reducible to culture.

This is certainly compatible with the ways in which an extreme actor like Ginsburg frames honor as

the experience of solidity and firm existence that post-Holocaust Jews ought to seek through violent

overcoming of their enemies. He associates the Hebrew word nekamah with yekum (existence) and

tekumah (establishment of the state), but the phenomenological link he recognizes can also take more

moderate or pro-social forms.

Philosopher Bernard Williams comes close to the phenomenological frame when he argues that

“The basic experience connected with shame is that of being seen, inappropriately, by the wrong

people, in the wrong condition.”16 This is not about abstract cultural rules but rather anxiety in the

face of social death or the collapse of effective social and bodily presence that have been subjected

to a shaming gaze. Perhaps not surprisingly, this more fluid and humane account allows Williams to

advocate for the reclamation of shame and honor as components of contemporary moral discourse

in a virtue economy, where we consider not just whether our actions are in accord with some

imagined set of formal rules but also what kinds of persons we become when we act in specific

ways. Opening ourselves to the possibility of shame, argues Williams, can mean opening ourselves to

responsibility.

15 Michael Jackson, Minima Ethnographica: Intersubjectivity and the Anthropological Project (Chicago: University Press, 1998), 13. 16 Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

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It is significant in this context that Ginsburg himself recognized that one of the most common

reactions to the Hebron massacre by mainstream religious and secular Jews in Israel was precisely

one of fear and shame, which is why he argued so vociferously, against the grain of public perception

and rabbinic opinion, that Goldstein’s act was an honorable one.

The Weightiness of Being in Jewish Religious Cultures

Moving from the general to the specifically Jewish, we find that kavod is a labile and multivalent

Hebrew term. Though it derives from a root that refers to weightiness or substance—gravitas might

be the most literal translation—a slightly different inflection yields uniqueness or distinction, which

also falls well within the normal range of meanings implied by the English term “honor.” We will

see that religious thinkers who emphasize kavod as gravitas and those who emphasize kavod as

uniqueness often arrive at very different conceptual conclusions about God and God’s ethical

demands. In the biblical context however, kavod participates in an extraordinarily broad semantic

network that includes material wealth, power, and glory (or repute) as well as sheer force of material

presence.17

Kavod is not the only term that refers to honor in the biblical and later Jewish corpus, but it is the

most central; it is applied to the divine as well as human personae and my working premise is that

what we might call anthropological and theological uses of the term and concept inform one another

continuously. A more accurate way of saying this might be that biblical narrative makes no simple

distinction between theology (depictions of God) and anthropology (the depiction of human life)

17 On the methodological use of the “semantic network” in anthropological analysis, see Byron Good, “The Heart of What’s the Matter: The Semantics of Illness and Distress in Iran,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 1(1979).

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because both God and human actors participate in the same complex social and literary biblical

tableau.

It is crucial on my reading to resist the merely lexical approach to textual meaning in which different

inflections of the same term are treated as wholly distinct—here glory, there wealth, here again

honor or divine hypostasis—without consideration of the ways in which these different

significations tend to bleed into one another or better yet, to convey meaning along a broad and

complexly interrelated semantic continuum. Consider the early chapters of First Samuel, which

exemplify this feature of biblical rhetoric. When the Israelites bring the Ark of the Covenant with

them into battle, the Philistines are at first discomfited, but then urge one another to “take courage

and acquit yourselves like men” (I Sam 4:19), invoking the social honor code. Later, when the

Philistines capture the ark and defeat the Israelites (I Sam 4: 19-22), the daughter-in-law of Eli the

priest bears a son whom she names I-kavod (Ichabod), saying “The glory [kavod] has departed from

Israel! Because of the ark of God that had been captured and because of her father-in-law and her

husband [who had been killed].”

These verses are densely emblematic of the rhetorical complications of honor discourse. On one

level, the departure of kavod from the Israelites refers in an anthropological vein to the loss of

father-in-law and husband, who also represent by synecdoche all of the terrible losses inflicted upon

a defeated and now humiliated Israel: Eli’s bereaved daughter-in-law stands for a bereaved and

defeated Israel. But kavod also refers to the physical ark itself, characterized here as the very presence

or glory of God, which has now quite literally departed from Israel. When the Philistines suffer

divine punishment for their possession of the ark however, their own priests and diviners urge them

to “give glory (kavod) to the God of Israel,” here signifying both public repute and the ark itself,

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whereupon they make offerings of gold to signify the esteem in which they hold Israel’s God before

setting in motion a highly ritualized return of Israel’s ark (I Sam 6: 5-16).

Kavod thus refers all at the same time to the fortunes of Israel and its virtues of manliness, to the ark

itself and its associated divine manifestation, and to the esteem or glory in which the Israelite God is

held by the Philistines, now that they realize their military victory over Israel was merely pyrrhic. It is

not hard to see how careful readers might infer from this passage alone that the humiliation of Israel

is therefore tantamount to God’s humiliation, just as Israel’s glory belongs to the Lord. There are

other passages that seem to cut against the grain of this reading (see Joshua 5:13, in which the angel

seems to avoid taking sides in Israel’s war), but these are the kinds of tensions that lend plausibility

to a variety of different exegetical orientations as well as the ethical or theological conclusions that

these give rise to.

One of the most salient themes associated with divine kavod in I Samuel and many other contexts is

the danger that contact with it represents for human beings. Not only is the Ark of the Covenant

deadly to those who mishandle it, but so are sites like Mount Horeb or the Tent of Meeting when

the divine kavod rests upon them. Scholars have explored the relationship between this kind of kavod

and the divine hypostases described in other ancient near eastern literatures, but this does not free

the kavod that rests upon the mountain from complex intertextual association with all of the other

meanings applied to kavod in biblical literature. Indeed, the danger of the kavod associated with God’s

presence owes much to the anthropological model of kavod as a zero-sum game in contests over

honor and power among social groups or individual men.

It should thus not come as any surprise that “breaking forth against the Lord” or encroaching upon

places where the divine kavod rests are considered to be sources of danger in biblical narrative

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because these acts are framed as disrespect towards divinity’s more absolute honor claim. There is

almost always an implicit or explicit threat of force in the negotiation of unstable human honor

hierarchies, and this is the anthropological background against which biblical representations of

divinity are embedded. God’s kavod is simply so “weighty” that it brooks no effective challenge or

competition, no matter how inadvertent. An extreme formulation, which nevertheless leaves its

footprint in many later theological expressions, is that divine honor simply overpowers and

extinguishes human honor in certain contexts.

Rabbinic literature channels the Bible’s dangerous-kavod motif in significant ways. In the Babylonian

Talmud, Hagigah 14a, “those who are concerned for the honor of their Creator” are warned to avoid

contemplation of some divine mysteries, and the consequences of those who fail to heed this

warning are serious, though later interpreters disagree strongly about what precisely is being

prohibited.18 Elsewhere, the perceived tension between human and divine honor takes the form of a

legal debate over the circumstances in which concerns for human dignity might trump certain kinds

of religious mandates. “Great is the honor of created beings [kavod ha-briyot],” declares one early

rabbinic statement (Berakhot 19a), “which casts aside a negative commandment of the Torah.” Kavod

ha-briyot is commonly treated in modern Hebrew as an expression for the egalitarian conception of

human dignity described by writers like Peter Berger, but it is clear from the talmudic context that it

also conveys the older sense of personal honor that varies according to rank and station. Can priests

violate certain purity restrictions by leaping over graves in order to show honor to a passing king?

Can one who discovers that he is wearing a forbidden mixture of wool and linen (shatnez) protect his

honor by retreating to a private place before removing it?

18 See Seeman, “Honoring the Divine as Virtue and Practice in Maimonides.”

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The talmudic discussion, whose details need not detain us here, works powerfully to constrain and

limit the conditions under which human honor might be thought to trump the divine, but I have

argued elsewhere that the very fact of rabbinic adjudication of such matters already puts human

beings on an honorable footing in that contest.19 This has allowed some later writers, like Rabbi

Kook and R. Yeruham Halevy Levovitz of Mir, a leading light of R. Yisroel Salanter’s Mussar

Movement, to argue that kavod ha-briyot is among the primary teloi of Jewish law.20

Yet this lofty and ennobling principal still cannot efface the agonistic underpinnings of the biblical

model, which continue to have powerful ethical consequences under the rabbinic rubric. Thus, while

sages of the law are typically empowered to define for faithful Jews the parameters of divine

obligation, there are nevertheless cases in which egregious behavior by erstwhile sages restores the

basic terms of the zero-sum game. Thus: “Where the name of heaven is being desecrated [i.e.

dishonored], we do not accord honor to a sage” (Berakhot 19b). All major codifiers agree that this

means we ought not to show honor to human authorities who behave in ways that cause divine

dishonor. The need to strike an appropriate balance between human and divine honor, or between

divine power and human autonomy, is one of the most consistent and least commented upon

cornerstones of Jewish moral logic, and I will argue that it has been conceptualized in three primary

ways in the Jewish intellectual tradition.

Three Paradigms of Divine Honor

Jewish ethical reflection has never lost its essentially exegetical habitus, and the complexity of divine

honor in both biblical and rabbinic sources has contributed to at least three dominant paradigms of

19 Seeman, “Violence, Ethics and Divine Honor in Modern Jewish Thought.” 20 Ibid.

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interpretation, which I will, for the sake of simplicity, label here as the vernacular, the philosophical,

and the mystical (or kabbalistic) paradigms. Vernacular divine honor derives from the commonsense

or everyday reading of biblical texts and religious practices in which God is portrayed as one actor

among others in a broad social field: one can honor or dishonor God in this paradigm in much the

same way that one honors or dishonors another person through acts of worship and obedience or

disrespect and apathy.

The vernacular paradigm itself is complex and highly differentiated. Instantiations include the vulgar

attempt to imagine God not just in human but even in thuggish terms, like the sermon I heard

several years ago from a preacher who thought pious Jews should model their fear of God on the

arbitrary terror experienced by subjects of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. But the vernacular

paradigm also includes more humane and sophisticated approaches that portray God as a

responsible parent, teacher, or king. Classical midrashim are not all cut from the same cloth, but

there are some that adopt a vernacular perspective in attributing human motives or experience to

God only to distance themselves from that perspective by simultaneously invoking the authority of

biblical language: “had it not been stated in Scripture,” they will sometimes say, “we could not have

said…” The meaning of this is simply that while Scripture may sometimes authorize the use of

anthropomorphic language, this does not free readers from remembering the implied disclaimer.

Abraham Joshua Heschel famously argued that these rabbinic texts (which he identifies with the

school of R. Ishamel) were precisely the soil from which later Jewish philosophical strictures on

anthropomorphism grew.21

21 See Abraham Joshua Heschel, Heavenly Torah: As Refracted Through the Generations, trans. Gordon Tucker (New York: Continuum Press, 2006); also see Azzan Yadin, Scripture as Logos: Rabbi Ishmael and the Origins of Midrash (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

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Be that as it may, the philosophical paradigm certainly did develop in response to vernacular

expressions. It flourished among the Babylonian Geonim and arguably reached its apogee among

the Iberian Jews and their spiritual heirs. All of these writers sought to distance themselves in one

way or another from potentially anthropomorphic interpretations of biblical texts, and one of the

classical loci for this struggle was Moses’ demand to see God’s kavod in Exodus 33. Could the master

of all prophets really have been asking to see a visible manifestation of the divine? Sa’adyah (d. 942),

among others, argued that Moses wanted to see the created—not divine—light that God sometimes

vouchsafed to his prophets as a proof of their divine mission. R. Hananel (d. 1053), in his talmudic

gloss, similarly argues that Moses sought a wholly internal “vision of the heart” that was no vision of

the eyes at all, and there were many variations on these themes.22 Rabbi Abraham Ibn Da’ud (d.

1180), who is often referred to as the first of the Jewish Aristotelians and a direct predecessor to

Maimonides, solved the problem in a different way, by arguing that the biblical appearances of kavod

or divine glory/honor actually refer to the appearance of a particular angel who was referred to by

the name of God.

Yet the most sophisticated and compelling of all these views was undoubtedly that of Maimonides

(1135-1204), whose Guide of the Perplexed cites the biblical account of Exodus 33-34 more than any

other single episode in Scripture. For Maimonides, the kavod Moses sought was neither a vision nor

a created light nor an angel, but rather a gloss for the philosophical apprehension of divine

incommensurability.23 To see God’s kavod, in other words, is precisely to see nothing, but to gain a

deeper understanding of the difference between God and every existent, or to distinguish the utter

difference between God and all created things. This should be as clear to us, Maimonides writes, as the

22 Seeman, “Divine Honor as Virtue and Practice.” 23 Ibid.

19

clarity with which one can distinguish the face of one’s friend from that of any other person in clear

daylight.24 God’s refusal of Moses’ request—“for man shall not see me and live”—points therefore

to the hard limits of human intellectual capacity, since we cannot help in some way comparing God

with the corporeal things that we know and comprehend.

Two elements of Maimonides’ approach are important to me in this chapter. The first is that

Maimonides self-consciously bridges the biblical use of kavod to signify the glory of God and kavod as

the honor due to God by arguing that one honors God precisely by recognizing that no visual (or

even intellectual) apprehension of the divine is possible. The person who seeks to “show concern

for the honor of his Creator,” according to Maimonides, learns not just to appreciate God’s

handiwork in nature but also to acknowledge the implications of human intellectual limits that

prevent us from ever knowing God as God is. Even more radically, however, Maimonides argues

that it is precisely the recognition of these intellectual limits that sets the stage for ethical knowledge.

Thus, in Maimonides’ reading of Exodus 33, Moses had to reach the height of philosophical

attainment before hitting the hard limits of human apprehension (“man shall not see Me and live”)

and then passing over to another kind of knowledge, which is glossed in biblical language as the

sight of God’s back, but which really means the apprehension of God’s actions in the world, since

these can be emulated. This is the theophany that Jews refer to as “the Thirteen Principles of

Compassion” which form the backbone of the High Holiday liturgy: “Lord, Lord, God gracious and

merciful, long suffering, etc.” Maimonides cites an early rabbinic reading of this episode that focuses

on moral teaching: “Just as He is called gracious,” say the rabbis, “so you should be gracious. Just as

He is called merciful, so you should be merciful.” This reading, which goes to the heart of

Maimonides whole moral praxis, begins with disciplined philosophical reflection upon the

24 Mishneh Torah, Laws of the Fundamental Principles of the Torah, Ch. 1.

20

incommensurability of the divine (Moses’ request to see God’s kavod) and leads inexorably to a

program of imitatio Dei, glossed at the end of the Guide as the embodiment of “kindness,

righteousness, and judgment.” In my earlier work I referred to this move as the collapse of ontology

into ethics, but here I will simply say that one learns to honor God by appreciating divine

incommensurability (i.e. apprehending the error of the vernacular conception) while approximating

divine actions in caring appropriately for others.

Maimonides’ reading of the divine kavod generated fierce and persistent critique. Already during his

own lifetime, the Provencal critic and kabbalist R. Abraham ben David’s (1125-1198) very first gloss

on Maimonides’ Code of Law involves a denunciation of Maimonides for ignorance of the true

esoteric meaning of “God’s face” (and by extension, kavod) in Exodus 33.25 Several decades later,

Nahmanides (1194-1270) takes aim at the whole philosophical paradigm Maimonides exemplifies by

insisting that the divine kavod was no vision of the heart or created light—still less a principle of

incommensurability—but an actual visual apperception (mar’eh mamash) of some aspect of divinity—

something Maimonides could not in any way have tolerated.26 In the sixteenth century, similarly,

Rabbi Meir Ibn Gabbai devoted a major section of his tract Avodat Ha-Kodesh specifically to refuting

Maimonides’ view in favor of the kabbalistic one according to which divine kavod represents an

aspect or level of the sefirotic emanation that can be perceived by adepts.

This is not the place for a detailed investigation of these sources, but I want to suggest that one way

of understanding what is at stake here is that kabbalists were by and large much more comfortable

with aspects of the vernacular reading than were their philosophical counterparts. Wolfson has

already shown that in contradistinction to philosophically oriented readers, kabbalists like

25 Ibid. 1:10. 26 Seeman, “Divine Honor as Virtue and Practice.”

21

Nahmanides tended to defend the literal interpretations of biblical texts, with the proviso that these

also hinted at deeper secrets.27 R. Menahem Recanati (1250-1301), for example, insists in the

introduction to his book on reasons for the commandments that while God certainly has no physical

limbs, the language of Scripture is nevertheless far more than metaphoric when it attributes to God

the spiritual potencies that correspond to a human hand or a foot. By this view, we could say that

divine kavod might really be analogized to human honor. The noted kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Hayyim

Luzzatto (1707-1746) wrote in a wholly vernacular register in his eighteenth century ethical

handbook Mesilat Yesharim, which calls upon the faithful to defend God’s honor (kavod) by

suppressing those who flout his will or oppress and humiliate his people.28 Luzzatto’s freedom to

invoke this commonsense human code of honor may be buttressed by his understanding of the

esoteric dynamics that correspond to such activities, where restoration of divine honor may literally

entail the tikkun or repair of the channels through which divine vitality is conveyed. For Luzzatto

and at least some other Jewish mystics, “kavod on high” is associated with the divine plenitude of

being.29

These three paradigms continue to influence Jewish thought in a variety of ways. I have argued that

to speak of divine kavod is to invoke a broad and labile semantic field. But is worth remembering

that this flowering of different interpretive paradigms grows from a linguistic tension between kavod

as uniqueness or incommensurability and kavod as force of presence that are both arguably attested

by the biblical text and the human condition that such texts address. Maimonides almost everywhere

27 Elliot R. Wolfson, “By Way of Truth: Aspects of Nahmanides’ Kabbalistic Hermeneutic,” AJS Review 14:2 (1989), 102-178. 28 Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto, Mesilat Yesharim, ed. Avraham Shoshana (Jerusalem: Ofek, 1999), 294-95. 29 See Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto, Kelah Pithei Hokhmah im Bi’urei Rabbenu David Cohen (Jerusalem: Ariel, 2009), 317 (ch. 39); also Seeman, “Emotion, Martyrdom and the Work of Ritual in R. Mordecai Leiner of Izbica’s Mei Ha-Shiloah.”

22

amplifies the sense in which kavod language implies uniqueness: kavod Shabbat means that the Sabbath

day must be treated as special and apart, just as divine kavod means that God cannot be

apprehended. Mystically inclined thinkers, by contrast, tend to emphasize the dimensions of

weightiness, power or sensate physical presence. Without invoking any articulate cosmology,

modern thinkers like Heschel and Buber have both seized upon divine “presence” as the true sense

of kavod in Scripture, and this view has been adopted by the New JPS Hebrew Bible, which

consistently renders kavod simply as “presence” when applied to God. This reading has become so

well accepted in fact, that it is important to remind readers that the Maimonidean philosophical

approach has also contributed to modern counter-readings by thinkers like Moses Mendelssohn

(1729-1786), Rabbi Kook (1865-1935), and Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), who each in his own

way reflected upon the dangers of unmediated vernacular divine honor.30

Ethics, Violence and State Power in Modern Judaism

Moses Mendelssohn’s 1787 publication of Jerusalem: on Religious Power and Judaism was foundational to

the Jewish confrontation with modernity. Mendelssohn argued that Jews and Christians ought to be

able to participate on equal footing in a state devoted to the principles of natural philosophy and

relieved of its formal affiliation with any Christian church. A large part of Jerusalem is devoted to

arguments against the coercive power of ecclesiastical institutions, but it has been insufficiently

appreciated how closely these are dependent in turn upon a theological argument about the correct

understanding of divine honor.

30 Because of space constraints, I cannot deal with Levinas in this chapter. See Seeman, “Violence, Ethics and Divine Honor.”

23

The current order in Europe, Mendelssohn notes, is based on an assumed division of labor between

church and state. The former was entrusted with the honor that human beings owed to God and

with human felicity in the afterlife, while the latter concerned itself with the maintenance of civic

order and human betterment in this world. Yet this division by its nature also leads to a conception

of competing values—duties to God and to fellow humans that must be weighed and balanced, with

the church assuming temporal authority to the extent necessary to defend divine honor and

interests. Yet this precisely, according to Mendelssohn, represents a theological error of significant

proportions:

God is not a being who needs our benevolence, requires our assistance, or claims any of our rights for his own use, or whose rights can ever clash or be confused with ours. These erroneous notions must have resulted in the, in many respects, inconvenient division of duties toward God and those toward man. The parallel has been drawn too far…Just as from a sense of duty toward our neighbor we sacrifice and relinquish something of our own, so we should do likewise from a sense of duty toward God. Men require service, so does God. The duty toward myself may come into conflict and collision with the duty toward my neighbor; likewise the duty toward myself may clash with my duty to God.31

Mendelssohn’s critique here is indebted not just to natural philosophy but also to Maimonides’

Guide, especially Book III, where Maimonides emphasizes that the divine commandments are given

solely with a view to the betterment of human beings.32 This was deeply at odds with Nahmanides’

and other kabbalist’s view that “human worship is a divine need” (avodah tzorekh gavo’ah), which is to

say that it serves metaphysical purposes. Mendelssohn was well familiar with Nahmanides’

commentary on the Pentateuch where he elaborates this argument.33

31 Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: On Judaism and Religious Power, trans. Allan Arkush (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 1983). 32 My reading of Mendelssohn resonates with Robert Erlewein, Monotheism and Tolerance: Recovering a Religion of Reason (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), though Erlewein emphasizes the general philosophical concern with divine “greatness” in opposition to human value and autonomy in writers like Kant and Feuerbach rather than Mendelssohn’s Jewish intellectual context. 33 On Mendelssohn’s use of Nahmanides, see David Sorkin, “Moses Mendelssohn’s Biblical Exegesis,” in Michael Albrect and Eva J. Engel (eds.), Moses Mendelssohn im Spannungsfeld der Auflärung (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2000), 243-276.

24

This is not all, because Mendelssohn also explicitly attributes religious violence and coercion to the

mistaken vernacular conception. “From this source flow all the unjust presumptions which the

ministers of religion have at time permitted themselves…All the violence and persecution which

they have perpetrated, all the discord and strife, all the mutiny and sedition…are purely and simply

the fruits of this pitiful sophistry.” 34 The view of God as a being who requires honor is indeed the

source of religious conflict for Mendelssohn, and its defeat implies an absolute break with all forms

of temporal authority for churches, including even the power to excommunicate sinners. The state,

by contrast, deserves broad and sweeping coercive power as the guarantor of the social contract and

“temporal felicity.” The state can even with justice suppress forms of religion like idolatry, according

to Mendelssohn, which it judges to be incompatible with public morality. Though his critique of

ecclesiastical power is incisive, Mendelssohn never really grapples in Jerusalem with the question of

limits to state authority or with the degree to which religious institutions did at least offer some

balance to unlimited executive force. Having evacuated divine honor entirely from the sphere of the

civil realm, Mendelssohn never really grapples with the sucking implications of that vacuum.

Nor does he spare Jewish ecclesiastical power from his critical vision. In order to justify

emancipation by the new, religiously neutralized European state for which he advocates,

Mendelssohn argues in book two of Jerusalem that Jews must also give up on any remnant of

medieval Jewish civil autonomy, though he portrays this (not very convincingly, in my view) as the

deepest desire and intuition of Judaism itself. Not only will Jews naturally lose the limited autonomy

over internal affairs that they sometimes enjoyed under Christian powers in order to become full

citizens, but they must also forgo excommunication and eschew the use of rabbinical courts in civil

and family matters.

34 Ibid. 58.

25

Despite this, and for reasons that are never entirely clear, Mendelssohn draws a sharp line at the

ritual or ceremonial aspects of Judaism, which he says that Jews are honor bound to obey even if

such fidelity were to come at the cost of their emancipation! This is tantamount to the reformulation

of Jewish life into the terms of a confessional religion. Book one of Jerusalem is directed primarily to

Christians and argued on natural philosophy grounds but book two is directed primarily to Jews and

framed in a more exegetical mode. It should come as no surprise that Mendelssohn’s chief focus in

book two is an extended reading of Exodus 33-34 (the same chapters that so exercised Maimonides)

and their partial retelling in Psalm 103.

For Mendelssohn, the assertion of divine compassion (“Lord, Lord, God merciful and gracious,

etc.”) that Maimonides identified with imitatio Dei should be understood as mediating against the

“concept of duties toward God—a mere half-truth,” which has “given rise to the equally unstable

concept of an offense against the majesty of God!”35 The possibility of offense against the majesty (i.e.

honor) of God is arguably at the heart of vernacular religion, to which Mendelssohn is in dedicated

opposition. People who think that the commandments must be obeyed in the same way that one

obeys the commands of a human king forget that God’s commands are given for human welfare

rather than divine honor.

Mendelssohn retells the whole saga of Jewish sacred history as a movement away from the pristine

early biblical identification of the state with God’s honor, such that “every sacrilege against the

authority of God, as the lawgiver of the nation, was a crime against His Majesty, and therefore a

crime of state.” Pushing his argument for the privatization of Jewish religious life and conscience far

beyond any previous Jewish religious thinker, he argues astoundingly that the ultimate model

35 Ibid. 123.

26

towards which Judaism aspires should be identified by the New Testament aphorism to “render

unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is Gods.”36 There is simply no way in which divine

honor can be threatened by human freedom in this account, nor can the Jews be humiliated even by

the loss of those few vestiges of sovereignty left to them. Mendelssohn never went so far as to

abrogate the ceremonial laws of Judaism, and as we have seen he defended them as still binding on

individual Jews, but it is fair to say that his highly abstract and anthropocentric account helped to

pave the way for later reformers like Abraham Geiger, who argued that the Jews were no longer a

people or a nation at all, but only a community of adherents to a common idea which he called

“ethical monotheism.”37

While reform flourished in Western Europe, it was only one of several solutions proposed by

modern Jews to the crises of modernity. In nearly polar opposition to the positions of both

Mendelssohn and early reform, proto-Zionist rabbis Tzvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795-1894) in Prussia

and Yehudah Alkalay (1798-1878) in Serbia both invoked divine honor alongside the honor of Israel

in pleas to effect Jewish self-determination accompanied by traditional observance. Alkalay wrote

that the physical return of Jews to the holy land itself would affect a rectification of the divine kavod,

which he identified in kabbalistic terms with the divine presence or Shekhinah.38 This blending or

mutual reinforcement of vernacular and kabbalistic conceptions proved exceedingly durable, and

was central to the message later espoused by Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), first chief rabbi of

36 Ibid. 132. 37 Abraham Geiger, “A General Introduction to the Science of Judaism,” in Max Wiener (ed.), Abraham Geiger and Liberal Judaism: The Challenge of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962), 149-169. 38 See for example R. Yehudah Alkalay, Kol Kitvei R. Yehudah Alkalay (Jerusalem: Mossad Ha-Rav Kook, 1974), Vol. 2, 559-570.

27

the Jewish Yishuv (community) in Palestine, and his son Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah (1891-1982),

ideological founder of the Gush Emunim settler’s movement.

I will have more to say about the elder Rabbi Kook’s unique synthetic approach in a moment, but it

is perhaps not surprising that one of the fiercest rabbinic anti-Zionists, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum of

Satmar (1887-1979), also framed his implacable opposition to Jewish nationalism as a defense of

divine honor in the vernacular mode. In his theological treatise On Change and Redemption, offered in

response to the Israeli victory in 1967, which so many other writers had hailed as miraculous,

Teitelbaum argued that Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem would constitute a grave dishonor to God

under current conditions, because the Jewish state would be forced to tolerate the persistence of

idolatrous (i.e. Christian) worship in the holy city, and would even find itself acting as the defender

of the (non-Jewish) holy sites.39 Teitelbaum rejects the Zionist emphasis on Jewish sovereignty and

national honor in order to focus exclusively on obedience to the divine command to uproot idolatry

as he understands it. The Zionists, he writes, “have exchanged their honor” (i.e. their true honor) in

obedience to God for a false secular-national one. While I have argued that the vernacular approach

is frequently associated with threats of violence, Teitelbaum’s example shows that we ought to resist

any simpleminded correlation between a particular theological stance and its associated politics.

Even in its vernacular mode, divine honor represents at best a set of interpretive coordinates that help

to shape complex debates among modern Jewish thinkers who must weigh the moral significance of

historical events like the holocaust or the Six Day War. Contemporary Satmar quietism (honoring

God by suffering the humiliation of the Jews) may draw support from this language alongside the

39 R. Joel Teitelbaum, Kuntres Al Ha-ge’ulah Ve-al Ha-temurah (New Edition; Brooklyn: Jerusalem Publishers, 2004).

28

activist religious Zionism (restoring divine honor by restoring Israel’s), to which Teitelbaum himself

was so implacably opposed.

We also need to remember that while the three paradigms I have laid out in this chapter do reflect

something important about the structure of Jewish intellectual history, they are only heuristic in the

sense that some individual thinkers drew inspiration from more than one well. I have described

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook’s position elsewhere, but his writings constitute one of the most

important examples of this theme in modern times, so at least a few words are in order here.40 Rabbi

Kook immigrated to Palestine from Latvia in 1904 to accept the post of chief rabbi of Jaffa and its

environs. He was deeply steeped in both Jewish mystical and philosophical literature, and was

apprenticed for a time to the great Lithuanian kabbalist R. Shlomo Eliasov (Elyashiv – author of

Leshem Shevo Ve-ahlama), who occasionally cited Maimonides’ Guide to critique Kabbalistic views he

found too anthropomorphic, including the idea we have discussed, that God requires human

service.41 Like his teacher, Rabbi Kook treats the Jewish philosophical tradition not as an alternative

to kabbalah (though he clearly recognizes that it has often been thought of as such) but as an

important critical lens through which spiritual trends may be purified of anthropomorphic dross.

This is the spirit in which many of his comments on divine honor must be understood.

When the honor of heaven [kavod shamayim] is lucidly conceptualized, it raises the worth of humanity and of all creatures, and fills them with a consciousness of the greatness of soul that is joined to pure humility. The honor of heaven that is made corporeal [megusham] tends towards idolatry and debases the dignity of human beings as well as all other beings.42

This complex statement requires considerable unpacking which would exceed the scope of this

chapter, but at base it means that the anthropomorphic (i.e. vernacular) perception of divine honor

40 Seeman, “Violence, Ethics and Divine Honor.” 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. citing Middat Ha-Ra’ayah (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1973).

29

tends toward idolatry because it equates divinity with human corporeality. Moreover, Rabbi Kook

extends the line of thought begun by Maimonides and continued by Mendelssohn (though it is not

clear to me whether he has Mendelssohn explicitly in mind), which also equates such

anthropomorphism with an ethical failure in the debasement of human dignity. That is because the

anthropological model of kavod that the vernacular view relies upon also implies, as we have seen, a

zero-sum competition between God and man in which humanity cannot prevail:

The obligation to honor God is instantiated among [those who hold to this view] as a cruel demand from a physical being that longs for honor without limit, which degrades every good and refined sentiment inside them. It transforms them into sad and cruel slaves who hate one another and truly hate God in their innermost hearts, even though they constantly speak words of love and honor when they mention God’s name. “With their mouths and with their lips they honor Him, yet their hearts are distant from Him.”

“All that the world suffers,” he wrote around the time of World War I, “can be attributed to this

principle of purifying heaven’s honor from all of its dross and alloy.” Such words may not have

resonated with most readers at the time they were first written, but they seem very prescient now,

when writers like Yitzhak Ginsburg invoke a heady mix of postmodern expressivism and Hasidic

mysticism framed as a concern for divine honor that legitimates atrocity. Indeed, it was the powerful

juxtaposition of Rabbi Kook and this kind of literature that marked the genesis of my exploration

into this theme. He manages uniquely well to engage the philosophical critique of divine honor

within a vibrant mystical and Zionist ethos.

It is not my intention in this chapter to dispute in any way the emphasis upon local ethnographic

conditions and contemporary cultural trends highlighted in this volume by Shlomo Fischer’s account

of religiously inflected violence in Judea and Samaria. On the contrary, these two accounts should be

viewed as structural complements. Fischer emphasizes the “horizontal” force of contemporary

expressive culture, to which should be added the unspoken but profound mimetic relationship

30

between Palestinian suicide bombers and the likes of Barukh Goldstein. This chapter, by contrast,

highlights the vertical synchronic development of divine honor in the context of Jewish intellectual

history. Decisions by contemporary social actors can never be reduced to the formulations of

classical religious texts, but they are also frequently incomprehensible without reference to the

religious discourse and interpretive traditions that help to generate meaning in any society. We are

only beginning now to generate the kinds of textually aware ethnographies that will demonstrate

how textual practices and the theologies they support contribute to the engendering of a religious

and cultural habitus in which certain choices come to seem reasonable or even inevitable to those

who live them.43 It must also be said that the anthropology of Judaism lags behind the anthropology

of Islam and Christianity in this regard.

One of my goals in this chapter has been to demonstrate, in a somewhat more systematic way than

previously, the centrality of divine honor to traditional Jewish reflections on a group of themes

related to ethics, violence, and the power of the state. My account is not by any means

comprehensive, and there are many other writers whose views could be usefully explored in this

context. Yet I hope to have shown that despite the diversity of approaches to divine honor in

classical Jewish thought, some common exegetical coordinates do emerge. These include ongoing

debates over anthropomorphism, the ethical significance of potential opposition between divine and

human honor, and the contested identification of divine honor with that of the human (or national)

collective. Honor language almost always invokes potential violence and the hierarchical imposition

of power across a social field, but it also contains resources for thinking about that power in critical

43 Some of these concerns will begin to be addressed in two forthcoming ethnographic dissertations: one by my student at Nehemia Stern at Emory, “First Flowering of Redemption: An Ethnography of Religious Zionism in Contemporary Israel,” and one by Shlomo Guzman-Carmeli, “Encounters Around a Text: An Anthropological Examination of Jewish Textuality,” at Bar-Ilan.

31

and illuminating ways. Given the centrality of God’s honor to traditional religious thought and

experience, its near absence from many facets of contemporary political analysis is worrying, because

it creates a vacuum into which extremist ideologues frequently gravitate.

The failure of academic scholarship to thematize relationships between divine and human honor in

Jewish textual history stems, in my view, from a failure to imagine how a protean concept like kavod

can usefully bridge the theological and anthropological registers. Yet this was obvious to many

traditional readers. In one extraordinary passage, the biblical commentator Shlomo Ephraim

Luntshitz (d. 1619) notes in his commentary Keli Yakar that while Moses commands the Israelites to

avenge God against the Midianites (Numbers 31:3), God’s instructions to Moses (31:2) were only

that the Israelites should avenge themselves upon Midian for their own losses. Luntshitz argues in line

with the philosophical paradigm that since God cannot be harmed neither can he be avenged, but

that Moses the rhetorician understood how important the vernacular discourse of divine honor

could be in motivating people for war. The phenomenological approach for which I have been

advocating aims to aid reflection upon the grounds of violence by making these discursive bridges

plain.

.

Plowshares into Swords?

Reflections on Religion and Violence

Christian and Jewish Perspectives

from

The Institute for Theological Inquiry

Robert W. Jenson and Eugene Korn, editors

The Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation

Plowshares into Swords?

Reflections on Religion and Violence

Table of Contents

I. Introduction - Eugene Korn

II. Religion and Violence

1. Secularization, Violence, and Idolatry - William T. Cavanaugh

2. Religious Violence, Sacred Texts and Theological Values - Eugene Korn

3. The State Crisis and Potential for Uncontrolled Violence in Israel-Palestine - Shlomo

Fischer

4. God’s Honor, Violence and the State - Don Seeman

5. Cain and Abel - Christopher Leighton

6. Good Samaritans, Violence and Humanitarian Intervention - Eric Gregory

III. Afterword - Robert W. Jenson

IV. Author Profiles